Julia Foster and her mother can't seem to agree about anything - Julia's friends, her clothes, and most of all, her consuming interest in music. Determined to be herself, not the "perfect" girl her mother hopes for, Julia chooses to live with her grandmother and her divorced father in a little town in the Cascade Mountains. But tiny Moon Valley lacks the one thing Julia desperately craves: a good music teacher. When a girl dressed in white appears among the cattails, singing Puccini arias in a haunting voice, Julia knows she must meet her and find out where she studies. But the girl always manages to slip away and vanish among the trees. There are hints that the people of Moon Valley may have the answer to the mystery, and surely Luke Sutherland, Julia's silent, blue-eyed neighbor, knows more about this elusive person than he will admit. With her latest novel, Cattail Moon, award-winning Jean Thesman has created a romance, a mystery, and an absorbing story of a young girl who is learning to claim her decisions and choices as her own.
Author
"My mother taught me to read before I started school, but I had to wait to be six before I could have a library card."[ Author's quote from her website.] "In 25 years, I wrote 40 books. Most of them came out under my own name, but a few were published under the name T.J. Bradstreet."[ Author's quote from her website.] She lives in Washington State, and is a member of The Authors Guild and the Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators.[ Houghton Mifflin website] Jean Thesman is a popular and award-winning novelist for young adults whose predominant theme is the heroine finding her place in the world by coming to understand her family. "I loved telling the story, because I really believed that families were made up of the people you wanted, not the people you were stuck with." —Emily Shepherd[Jean Thesman, In the House of the Queen's Beasts (Viking, 2001, p.79).]
